Actor Mark Houghton is shown in a scene from the new action feature film "Snakes On A Plane" in this undated handout photograph. After endless parodies, Weblogs, videos, books, news reports and T-shirts, "Snakes on a Plane" finally opens in the United States on August 18, 2006 with no one knowing quite what to expect from the super-hyped film other than a story about reptiles patrolling a panicky passenger jet. To match feature LEISURE SNAKES. NO ARCHIVES FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY REUTERS/James Dittiger/New Line Productions/Handout (UNITED STATES)

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Actor Mark Houghton is shown in a scene from the new action feature...

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Actor Samuel L. Jackson is shown in a scene from the new action feature film "Snakes On A Plane" in this undated handout photograph. After endless parodies, Weblogs, videos, books, news reports and T-shirts, "Snakes on a Plane" finally opens in the United States on August 18, 2006 with no one knowing quite what to expect from the super-hyped film other than a story about reptiles patrolling a panicky passenger jet. To match feature LEISURE SNAKES. NO ARCHIVES FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY REUTERS/James Dittiger/New Line Productions/Handout (UNITED STATES)

"Snakes on a Plane" will never land on "Sight & Sound's" Best Films of All Time list, and, though it's unfair, the American Film Institute will probably never include "I've had it with these mother -- snakes on this mother -- plane" among its roster of great movie quotations. But if you can find a better time at the movies this year than this wild comic thriller, let me in on it. I'm there.

A distinction must be made: There can be no doubt that people were going to enjoy this movie no matter what. After months of hype on the Internet, people were going to like this movie even if they had to force themselves. Nobody sleeps outside a theater to have a bad time. But take all that off the table -- forget the promotion, forget the phenomenon -- and just sit there and watch it. This is a perfectly respectable picture that, despite its modest aspirations, accomplishes something elusive: It finds and maintains that delicate balance between the genuinely thrilling and the flat-out ridiculous.

The picture opened Friday (actually at 10 p.m. Thursday) without screening for critics, usually a fatal sign, but in this case there was no reason to hide it. Perhaps the reasoning went that, for "Snakes on a Plane," reviews wouldn't matter. That's probably true. Or perhaps someone thought the movie would be best served if it were seen the way it's going to be seen by most people, late at night with a raucous crowd.

That's certainly how I saw it. At San Francisco's Metreon on Thursday night, there was a packed house, and yet two prime seats on the aisle were unoccupied. Closer inspection revealed that someone had thrown up on those seats, which should give you an idea of the condition of some people entering the theater. The mostly young audience came determined to root, shout and heckle "Snakes on a Plane" into a fun experience, and yet within 20 minutes it became clear that that would take no strenuous effort. Contrary to expectations, the picture did not turn out to be so bad it's good, but rather so extreme it's good, so shrewd it's good, so funny it's good, so good it's good.

If "Snakes on a Plane" is ultimately remembered for anything, it may be as the apotheosis of Samuel L. Jackson, as the movie that most tested Jackson's ability to maintain his cool under circumstances of extreme exasperation. He plays an FBI agent, transporting a witness from Honolulu to Los Angeles. If the significance of that plane route isn't immediately clear, take a look at the map: Between those two points, there's nowhere to land a plane.

The witness (Nathan Phillips) saw an evil crime boss (Bryon Lawson) commit murder, and the boss does not want him to reach the mainland. So with lightning speed he improvises a way to bring down the plane. He arranges to have hundreds of poisonous snakes put in boxes for transport and to have the snakes aroused into a frenzy by the spraying of pheromones throughout the plane. That's all he needs to for a crisis -- and all the screenwriters need for a premise.

It's no surprise that "Snakes on a Plane" should be a blast at the beginning. When two randy young lovers go into a cramped airplane bathroom together and start taking off their clothes, the only question is where the snake will bite them -- but that's a question of intense interest. In another bathroom interlude, a man absentmindedly urinates, not noticing that he is directing the flow onto the head of a disgruntled snake that has crawled up through the plumbing. When the snake latches on to him ... no, this is just too ghastly to talk about.

That's all very funny, screamingly funny, hysterically funny, but that all comes in the first half-hour. The wonder is that screenwriters John Heffernan and Sebastian Gutierrez and director David R. Ellis are able to stretch this into a satisfying feature-length movie. They succeed by avoiding a couple of easy outs and by doing a lot of things right. The main shortcut avoided is to get cute and try to make a bad movie, as though that would be fun. Yet another avoided is the temptation is to dive head first into the ridiculous.

Though "Snakes on a Plane" is to a faint degree a satire of action movies, and though it's made with a sophisticated awareness of the conventions of those films, it nonetheless actually works as a straight-up action movie. It consistently offers up interesting and perilous situations, and it places characters that we come to care about in those situations. This is not "Airplane." There's no winking at the audience. The director's wisest move is that, though some of the passenger characters are intended to be funny, he has the principals -- Jackson and Julianna Margulies, as a flight attendant -- play it straight. In fact, Margulies' performance could be transposed into a dramatic film with no adjustment. This is a good thing that keeps "Snakes" working as a thriller.

Is there something more here? Is there anything more to be said? Is this a metaphor for terrorism? The movie began life as a screenplay a decade ago, but it took until now for the true marketability of snakes on a plane to be realized. There's probably something going on here, but it might spoil the fun to figure it out.